Bruno Pontecorvo
Bruno Pontecorvo ( born August 22, 1913 in Pisa, † September 24, 1993 in Dubna, Russia ) was an Italian physicist. He made significant research in the field of neutrinos.
Pontecorvo, who came from a wealthy Jewish family in Pisa, was the brother of the geneticist Guido Pontecorvo (1907-1999) and Gillo Pontecorvo director. He studied in Rome and was there in the 1930s to the group of physicists led by Enrico Fermi, where he was one of the youngest members and a close associate and friend of Fermi was. He was involved in Fermi's experiments with slow neutrons. From 1936 he worked in Paris in the laboratory of Irène Joliot- Curie and Frédéric Joliot- Curie on nuclear physics. In Paris, he also turned to socialism. When the German occupation threatened, he fled in 1940 from France to Spain in the United States. There he developed for an oil company in Tulsa a well - examination procedures with neutron irradiation.
Because of his socialist conviction, he was not allowed to participate in the Manhattan Project, but he was from 1943 in Montreal Laboratory in Canada, where he worked on the design of nuclear reactors, about cosmic radiation, the decay of the muon and neutrino. In 1948 he became a British citizen and went at the invitation of John Cockcroft to the AERE at Harwell, where he was Egon Bretscher ( 1901-1973 ) in nuclear physics department. In 1950 he became professor of physics at the University of Liverpool.
On 31 August 1950, he disappeared to say about it without friends and acquaintances suddenly with his wife and three children from a holiday in Rome and went over Stockholm and Finland to the Soviet Union. It was assumed in the West a similar case of espionage as Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo but had very limited access to secret information in western atomic bomb projects. Pontecorvo signed up until 1955 in the Russian Pravda back and called on Western scientists to conduct research only on a civilian nuclear energy. The rest of his life he spent with his family in Russia, where he enjoyed great privileges and passed away in 1993. He left the Soviet Union again until 1978 during a visit to Italy. Most recently, he was suffering from Parkinson 's disease. His ashes placed on our own desire to half in Rome at the Protestant cemetery, half buried in Dubna.
Pontecorvo was in the Soviet Union at the JINR in Dubna. The JINR gives to his memory the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize.
In 1953 he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1958 he became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and he twice received the Order of Lenin.
Pontecorvo was one of the first who faced the possibility of observation of neutrinos in the eye and also of neutrino oscillations. In 1946, he proposed a method before to observe antineutrinos from reactors, a method by which Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan 1956, the neutrino discovered. Pure was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize. In 1959, he proposed a method of observation of muon - neutrinos, which in 1962 Jack Steinberger, Melvin Schwartz and Leon Lederman succeeded, for the 1988 received the Nobel Prize. In 1957, he was considering the idea of neutrino oscillations, which one of his main areas of interest was. Also they have been confirmed experimentally in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1969, he struck with Vladimir Gribow for the possibility of Leptonenzahlverletzung a Majorana mass term of neutrinos and they turned to the problem of the solar neutrinos.